


F4F

by Storybook_Wolf



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Insomnia, Instagram, Jancy Fic Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-21 04:40:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14908503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Storybook_Wolf/pseuds/Storybook_Wolf
Summary: When Nancy Wheeler can't sleep, she looks at Instagram until her eyes hurt. One night, she discovers Jonathan's account...For day 4 of the Summer of Jancy Fanfic Week, Modern Times.





	F4F

Nancy Wheeler couldn’t sleep.

She knew all the things she was supposed to do in this situation: drink some sleepytime tea; make sure the room was quiet and dark; meditate; and most of all stay away from screens. But instead, she did what she did every night: open Instagram.

She didn’t post all that much to @nancyyyy, maybe one or two pics a month. Last weekend she’d spent half of Saturday working on a post that she wasn’t too proud to admit was basically a thirst trap aimed at @KingSteve. She’d tried four different outfits and made Barb shoot her from about a million different angles and in every conceivable lighting until she got a shot she was happy with. Barb had grumbled about it, but good-naturedly – after all, Nancy had done the exact same thing for her last term, when Barb was trying to hook up with Tyler Rosen. But thanks to Barb’s killer curves, it hadn’t been nearly as time-consuming to get a pic that looked hot. (If anything, Barb had the opposite problem. They’d take a simple selfie at the mall or something, and she’d be like, ‘I can’t post that, it’s way too cleavagey. My aunt follows me, for God’s sake!’)

Anyway, the thirst trap seemed to have worked. Steve had liked it (he liked a _lot_ of girls’ pics), but what really mattered was that he’d commented with a fire emoji. It had made her feel pretty confident that their brief make-out session at Tommy H’s party wouldn’t just be a one-time thing.

Despite her infrequent posting, Instagram was probably her most-used app. She’d scroll through until she’d seen everything the accounts she followed had posted (as far as she could tell – she’d been so pissed off when they changed the algorithm so it wasn’t just a chronological feed any more). Then she’d refresh the explore tab over and over, to see what else was out there. Eventually she’d pick some random rabbithole to fall down, following it until her eyes hurt and she was finally exhausted enough to sleep.

Tonight she clicked on @MikeThePaladin, her brother’s account. God, his handle was so lame – it was cute how much he and his friends threw themselves into their roleplaying games, but she was pretty sure he’d find that name super embarrassing by the time he got to high school.

She loved her brother to death, but lately they both seemed to drive each other crazy, and any irl interaction just ended in one of them kicking the other under the table, or slinging some sarcastic insult. She figured that until he grew out of this insufferable middle schooler phase, the only way she could really know what was going on with him was to check his digital footprint. Unsurprisingly, he followed a LOT of nerdy accounts, particularly fan stuff for this sci-fi Netflix show he was obsessed with. She’d noticed that he frequently liked edits about one of the slash ships, which was pretty interesting – she’d definitely wondered if he was into boys, tbh. But then he also seemed to like pretty much every post from @elhop, a pretty girl in his class, so who knows?

He hadn’t posted anything new for a few days, but he’d been tagged in a post that afternoon – a photo of him and his best friend Will riding their bikes. It was black and white, and the boys were almost silhouetted against the sky as they crested a hill, Mike standing up on the pedals and Will slightly hunched over his handlebars, his jacket flying out behind him in the wind. They both looked so happy – jubilant, almost. It was a really great photo.

It had been posted by someone called @_shadowplay_, and when she clicked through to their account she saw that it was Jonathan Byers, Will’s brother. He’d been in her class since kindergarten, but she didn’t really know him all that well. He mostly kept to himself. Not in a weird way – he was just really quiet, and didn’t seem to be interested in all the day-to-day drama of Hawkins High. She knew that he was smart (he was in a couple of her AP classes), and he seemed like a really good brother, often picking up Will from the Wheeler house when their mom was working.

She’d actually had a crush on him for a while in 7th grade. One time in the cafeteria when the conversation had turned to boys, she’d mentioned that she thought Jonathan kind of looked like Harry Styles, and Allie had laughed so hard she almost choked on a French fry. She’d never brought him up again. Eventually high school social divisions kicked in (and older boys like Steve came on her radar), and she hadn’t thought about him in that way for ages.

She started scrolling through his feed. Every pic was as good as the bike one. Not just the dumb food shots and selfies and drunken party photos that everyone else at school posted, but really thoughtfully composed shots of life around Hawkins – the neon lights of the old movie theatre on Main St, shoppers haggling over produce at the Sunday farmers market, a police truck parked at an alarming angle outside Benny’s Burgers. He actually made Hawkins look kind of beautiful. There were also lots of shots of his mom and brother that seemed to convey way more love than the typical snapshot. He’d capture them in the middle of doing something, often either unaware of the camera lens on them or just suddenly noticing it. There were almost no photos of him, except for one selfie of him and Will with their arms around each other last Christmas, in which Jonathan was blushing furiously as his little brother mugged for the camera.

She’d seen Jonathan around school with a camera a few times, but hadn’t thought much of it, figuring he was just taking the photography elective to fill his art requirement, like most people did. All these pics made it clear that it was much more than that – he was obviously really passionate about it. I mean, she’d known that his whole vibe for the last couple of years had been ‘artsy loner’, but she hadn’t realised that he actually had the talent to back it up.

And then, as she scrolled through, she saw something that made her do a double take. A photo of her.

Well, not just of her. It was a group shot, of people in the stands at a school basketball game, but the way the light was hitting her face made her the focal point of the photo. She wasn’t watching the game, but was obviously in the middle of telling Barb some story, leaning forward and gripping the taller girl’s forearm to emphasise her point. Her whole face was smiling, and Barb was laughing at whatever it was she was saying. She looked … good. She knew from experience that finding the right angles for her face was hard, but he’d somehow got them just right. And he’d managed to capture something about her friendship with Barb at the same time. She knew she should probably be weirded out at finding a photo of herself on the account of a boy she hardly ever spoke to, but for some reason she wasn’t. It was kind of nice to know that this keen eye that had found so much beauty and meaning in their dull little suburban town had noticed her in it too.

She scrolled further down, and as she passed a photo of Mrs Byers hanging Halloween decorations, her thumb fumbled and she accidentally liked it. _Shit_.

Her first instinct was to immediately unlike it, but she hesitated. _Screw it_ , she thought. _I’m just gonna start following him. That makes it less weird that I just liked a post from last year, right? He probably won’t even notice._ Then she realised that he only had 17 followers – yikes – which meant he would definitely notice. _So what? There’s nothing weird about me following him. I follow hundreds of people!_

*

The next morning, Instagram was the first app she opened when she reached for her phone, and she smiled to herself when she saw that @_shadowplay_ had followed her back and liked three of her posts. _So he’s either a night owl, like me, or he gets up really early_.

He hadn’t liked her thirst trap. Instead he’d liked a pic of her and Holly pulling ridiculous faces in the mirror, some cupcakes she had Barb had made one Sunday, and a selfie she’d taken last month. Only half her face was visible in the frame, leaned up against a classroom window on a wet afternoon, the rain-spattered windowpane making a blurry backdrop to her frown. She’d captioned it _Calculus got me feeling like…_ He’d even commented on that one: ‘This is a really great shot.’ It was a pretty innocuous comment, but it made her grin. She knew it really meant something, coming from him.

She liked the comment, and started to type a reply: _Thnx :)_ but then she deleted it. That was probably too much. But if she saw him in the hallway today, she’d make sure to smile. Why not, right? They’d known each other forever. Their brothers were friends. They had classes together.

And Allie could suck it – he totally did look a bit like Harry Styles.

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously, Natalia Dyer’s face is magnificent from any angle – Nancy is just insecure.  
> Also, ‘Shadowplay’ is the name of a Joy Division song, because 2018 Jonathan has the same musical taste as 80s Jonathan. But better hair, probably.


End file.
